The present invention relates to management of data and is particularly useful for the management of financial data from disparate sources and in different formats from different accounts, assets and investments.
Managing personal financial information includes organizing a flood of information from various incoming statements and in various formats including: bank statements, quotes, notes of phone calls with a broker, notes of new understandings of the financial portfolios, etc. Management of personal data is conventionally performed with the use of a spreadsheet application program. First, a decision is made regarding how to present the data in spreadsheet tables and then data is entered into the spreadsheet tables from each incoming statement. Alternatively the statements are available in an electronic format and an existing computer application is used which imports the electronic statements assuming the format is supported by the application. Otherwise the data may be input manually into the application. Occasionally, the underlying model, e.g. the structure of the spreadsheet tables, is changed requiring a modification of the spreadsheet table structure. If a computer application is being used, migrating to a newer version of the application or to a different application typically requires a change in the underlying model. A model change is also needed for instance whenever there is a change in assumptions: e.g. change in tax laws, change in personal tax situation or whenever new financial information needs to be represented in the model. The situation is further complicated when working with tax systems simultaneously from several countries. Tax rules change and as a result the data model needs to change. All tools assumes there is just one truth about the data which is called the “consolidated” information. The user is required to perform the endless task of manually verifying the consolidated information at any point in time.
A change of model may also be required whenever a new type of statement is input, even if the new statement contains just one new field not previously considered in the model. Changing the model, e.g. spreadsheet tables currently in use and the relations between them, can be a daunting task: existing data requiring restructuring, and import tools have to be modified.
Commercial financial software packages (e.g. Intuit Quicken or QuickBooks, Microsoft Money or gnucash) are designed to manage checking accounts especially if they are held in a US bank or perform bookkeeping. These packages typically have limited functionality for managing investments. An import tool is required for importing information from each statement each in the appropriate format, e.g. spreadsheet, comma separated values (CSV). Each format requires bank specific processing depending on the financial institution. (CSV is one implementation of a delimited text file, which uses a comma to separate values.) Even if the financial institution exports information in a well defined file format (e.g., Open Financial Exchange, OFX) the commercial packages are not guaranteed to handle the disparate formats correctly if at all.
OFX is a data-stream format for exchanging financial information. The OFX standard was designed as a unified technical specification which allows for bank and application specific extensions. Few banks support OFX as a vendor-independent format, preferring to support a narrow subset used only by a specific financial software application, such as Quicken.
When using an existing financial management application it is hoped that the required model currently in use will be supported in future versions and support for the computer application in use will not be discontinued. In existing software packages, questions about the financial data, are either programmed already, or if not hopefully support will be available in the next version. Other software packages are available to analyze current investment portfolio and give investment suggestions for the future but they are not particularly suitable for collecting information, looking back at history, or just showing in great detail the current investment position. Some banks supply Web tools that show your current portfolio but they lack information from other financial institutions without generating exposure between banks.
There is thus a need for, and it would be highly advantageous to have a method of managing, consolidating and analyzing information, such as personal financial information and investments which comes from disparate sources.